Blood Lilies

Blood Lilies The two men burdened with the task of telling this wife that her husband had been found dead were never the same afterwards, spoken nightmare released from their lips like the barb of a wasp, the pooling of everything that followed. He had been found by the river, body turned to the side, reverse of the blood lilies lining the shore of the water. They had no more. Nothing more to say, nothing to offer her for the loss. The dead do not bargain, do not trade at any sign of someone capable of joining their own. And these men kept their distance from the inside of the house, not wanting to disturb the children, not wanting to be the filaments of the fallen, whose power descends through them like the light of a prism. They went home, going their separate ways-- one, to a prison to visit his father. The other, to a bar in the suburbs to drown out the synapses of his brain firing, alcohol dulling his breathing, postponing the return to what keeps him going--his own family, his harness from sleep.